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Grab a cup of tea, settle in, and prepare to be amazed. When Kate Lister, creator of Whores of Yore, agreed to come on the show, I did cartwheels.
And it’s pretty evident why as you listen to this fascinating and hysterical episode all about the history of sex, porn, and sex work.
Kinky Victorians who loved spankings and piss play? Check.
Medieval monks drawing trees full of dicks and women making strap-ons out of bread to fuck each other? Yep.
From the oldest recorded dildo in history to Kate’s research on sexual violence in contemporary media, you will learn more about the history of sex than you ever knew possible, and you’ll giggle all the way.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Kate Lister and I talk about:
- The word “whore” has an important history that Kate wasn’t aware of when she first started “Whores of Yore.” There’s a whole process of reclamation around that word for sex workers, so we need to be aware of the social stigma when we use it. Kate mentions Toni Mac’s TED talk about the laws sex workers really want.
- “Whore” is a really old word and it’s always been a term to stigmatize and abuse women.
- How Whores of Yore got started and Kate’s shock over how it’s snowballed.
- The oldest dildo discovered to date (it’s 28,000 years old), and all of the willies Kate tweets about. Here’s an example of an old dildo.
- A tree full of penises, a woman taking a walk with some penis geese? Just a normal day as a sexuality historian.
- BDSM and kink are as old as human sexuality, and Kate’s research demonstrates that kink is not bizarre or unusual but rather a normal part of how human’s have experienced sex through the ages.
- Sex work and how it is not the oldest profession in the world. Sex work only became a job once capitalism and commerce became a thing. Prior to that, sex work was not even part of the vocabulary for indigenous people.
- In a podcast first, you’ll hear “make it pink and stick macaroni pasta on it” in reference to pubic hair.
- We roll around in some older phrases for various kinds of sex and sex work. “Warming the husband’s supper” is now part of my vocabulary for life. Also, “sneezing in the cabbage.” Seriously.
- Some feelings from a fellow in the 600s about oral sex and semen in the mouth.
- Bread strap-ons. They were apparently a thing. I am so intrigued.
- A love spell from centuries ago that involved kneading bread with your vulva and feeding it to the object of your desire. I am NOT making this up.
- Want to see the tweet that Kate sent during the episode? Check it out. All the urine!
- Kate’s research into sexual violence and contemporary media. Game of Thrones has tons of sexual violence and violence in general, and people excuse it as historically accurate because we have cast our history as sexually barbaric. But research has not found any evidence that things were sexually violent in medieval times or that Vikings raped and pillaged. We are creating myths about our past, and Kate wonders if it’s a way for us to explore our own fantasies and desires around sexual violence.
Resources from this episode
An article about Whores of Your in The Daily Dot
About Kate Lister
Dr. Kate Lister is a researcher at Leeds Trinity University in historical attitudes to sexuality and sex work. She has published on the history of media narratives around sex work, the history of menstruation and sexual violence in historical dramas.
She is the curator of the popular Twitter account @WhoresofYore where she tweets the history of illicit sex and works to promote sex worker rights and challenge stigma to over 57, 000 followers. Kate is currently working with leading sex worker rights activists and historians to expanded the Twitter feed to a website and online archive that will allow sex workers to tell their stories, and bring sex work history to an even wider audience.
You can also follow along on Instagram.
(Note: this image is from Kate’s Whores of Yore Twitter.)
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: It’s that time again. Hi, listeners. This week’s episode of Sex Gets Real is hysterical. I’m so excited to bring it to you. I just want to remind you, it’s been amazing hearing so many of your voices call in and leaving voicemails to be part of the new intro that I’m creating for the podcast. If you want to get your voice to me so that you can possibly be part of the new intro I’m creating for the show, all you have to do is, if you’re in the US or Canada, just call 747-444-1840 from a nice quiet location and leave a message saying, “You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra.” If you’re outside one of those two countries and you still want to participate, I’ve been getting emails from people, which is amazing, you can record yourself saying that same phrase, download the mp3, and then email it to info@sexgetsreal.com.
I also want to invite you to go to dawnserra.com, and just make sure you’re part of the newsletter. I’ve got a couple of workshops that I’m going to be taking online plus some free talks that I’m going to be giving in the next couple of months. So to get notified about the free talks and some of the workshops that are going to be really awesome – I mean, next level stuff – then make sure you’re on the newsletter for dawnserra.com. I think now it’s time to jump into this really funny episode with Kate Lister from Whores of Yore.
Dawn Serra: Hey, everyone! Dawn Serra here with Sex Gets Real. This week, joining me on the show is Kate Lister. Welcome to the show, Kate.
Kate Lister: Hi, Dawn. It’s lovely to be with you. Thank you.
Dawn Serra: You run the Whores of Yore Twitter and Instagram, which is one of my favorite accounts in the entire universe.
Kate Lister: Oh. Thank you.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. For those of you who don’t know Kate, Kate is a university lecturer, a researcher of the history of sexuality, a whorestorian at the University of Perversity, a cake connoisseur, and the owner of Whores of Yore. I love that – whorestorian at the University of Perversity. What an amazing title!
Kate Lister: That’s not my official title.
Dawn Serra: But even as a self-selected one.
Kate Lister: Yeah. It works really well, doesn’t it? It always breaks the ice at Christmas parties, anyway.
Dawn Serra: I hope that you have cards that say that.
Kate Lister: I do. Absolutely, I do. Yeah.
Dawn Serra: Good.
Kate Lister: One thing that I’ve learned since having the blog is that I have to be very careful with the use of the word “whore” now. Because when I first started using it, it was because it rhymed very conveniently with Yore. I wanted to tweet about the history of sex work and sexuality, it just seemed to go together so nicely. But there’s a whole process of reclamation around that word for sex workers, and they can get very defensive when non-sex workers use it. I feel that I’m forever needing to define what I mean by it. You can get into trouble with it real quick.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I noticed that the pinned tweet on Whores of Yore is an attempt to explain the usage and your intent behind the word “whore.”
Kate Lister: That was because a sex work campaigner who did a TED talk, Toni Mac (or Juno Mac). She is a campaigner at the Sex Worker Open University. She got hold of me and said that some people within the sex work community we’re having an issue with me using that word. They felt that it was derogatory. They felt that it was adding to stigma instead of dismantling it. So I felt that, “Well, I like the sound of Whores of Yore, but I need to clarify what I mean by that.” What I mean by that is, just from a historical point of view, that word “whore” has been levied at any woman really. Let’s be honest. I mean, now we’re talking about manwhores, but it really means a woman. It’s been levied to any woman who’s transgressed sexual boundaries or has just been more confident and more outspoken and stood her ground more than most people. I mean, Joan of Arc was called a whore, and she died a virgin. So that was one of the things that I wanted to get across was that it’s not necessarily a stigmatizing or derogatory word or it doesn’t have to be. It’s a defiant word.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. It’s a word that as I’ve become more familiar with sex worker rights, sex worker issues, the discrimination against sex workers, it’s a word that I’ve phased out of my own vocabulary just because I felt like that’s not a space where I should be using the word at this time. But I think it’s such a powerful word and a powerful conversation to have because then we get to talk about all of these things and how we vilify the sexuality of women throughout time.
Kate Lister: Well, yeah. Whore is a really, really old word. I mean, it’s really old. Even its origin is lost in the mists of time somewhere. But it’s always been there. It’s always been a term that’s been used to stigmatize and abuse women. And not just sex workers. Women just having sex they were regularly called whores and all kinds of words. That’s how I was using it because I wanted it to be a history of illicit sex. But I am now very sensitive to the fact. I’m very careful that I only really use it in the handle. That when I’m tweeting and how I’m expressing myself, otherwise, it’s not my word to use in other contexts, if that makes sense. But, yeah. I think understanding the history of stigmatizing sex and especially, female sexuality is very important.
Dawn Serra: For those of our listeners who don’t know what your Twitter and Instagram are all about, can you give us an idea of how it got started and what it’s become? Because you’re now at almost 55,000 followers. It’s been around for about a year, right?
Kate Lister: Just under a year. Yeah. I started it, I think it was last November, December time, I think. I think. Yeah. I researched the history of sexuality and gender and literature and those kinds of things at the University of Leeds Trinity in the UK. I just kept finding all these really interesting facts and figures. There was so much personal history there, just little history, little people’s history. Just people who weren’t on the radar that just crop up occasionally. They were always the ones that interested me the most. I mean, it’s great that King whoever was doing this, and whatever. But what were people doing for birth control in the Middle Ages? That kind of thing has always really interested me.
So I wanted to start tweeting just little parts of my research that I was finding, things that made me laugh or I thought were interesting or things that were shocking. To be honest, I didn’t think that anyone would really be that interested in it apart from me, and it just snowballed. Then before I knew where I was, I had several thousand followers. But it’s the followers that make it, really. I mean, they’re the ones that feed back to me all the time and give me information. They send me pictures, and they give me comments. Without them it’s just a woman in her 30s tweeting pictures of willies.
Dawn Serra: There are a number of very, very old dildos which tickles me. It’s like I feel like we think of dildos as being somewhat new, but here you have pictures of carved dildos and stone dildos from hundreds of years ago.
Kate Lister: The oldest one that we found – I say we, I didn’t find it – but the old one that has been found was in Germany, and it’s 28,000 years old. It’s this big stone phallus thing. The best bit about that is when people like the archaeologists and historians are not quite sure what it is in the early days, they say things like, “It’s a phallic-shaped tool,” before they finally just go, “No. Do you know what this is? This is a dildo. We’re just going to call it a tool.” Someone just calls it and just goes, “No, no. This isn’t a tool.”
Dawn Serra: “We’re not stirring our soup with this. We’re actually using it somewhere else.”
Kate Lister: “It could be a coat hanger. Does it look like a coat hanger to you?” “No.”
Dawn Serra: How are you finding all of these images? I mean, some of the images that you post are just stunning, and they’re also diverse. I mean, there’s pictures from like the Roman ages and pictures through the 1800s and 1900s. I mean, some beautiful nudes in the 20s. I mean, how are you finding all of these?
Kate Lister: Well, there is a very nice person, who runs an archive called deltavenus.com. He has got a huge archive of vintage art, and he very kindly let me have access to it as long as I give him a shout out whenever I’m using some of his images. He’s incredibly useful. The Roman images, the frescoes, and the pictures from Pompeii and all those countries, they’re all available with various archives online. Wiki Commons is a good one because they’re all in the public domain as well. I’m very careful with the images that I tweet pictures of ‘cause I’m always aware of copyright, which is a nightmare. But most of them are so old that they’re outside of copyright. Then people send me pictures, which is extremely kind and very humbling. And I buy pictures – I buy vintage nudes and erotica from eBay, of all places. There’s all kinds of collections that you can go and see. There’s a few archives online, so it’s just a case of knowing where to look for them really.
Dawn Serra: The images that you post are just so fascinating. One of the things that it just really highlighted for me, as I’ve been following you for the past couple of months or so, is… I mean, there’s pictures from medieval times with trees full of penises.
Kate Lister: Ah! The penis tree.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, penis tree. There’s pictures of women walking with geese, who actually don’t have geese heads. They have penis heads.
Kate Lister: Yes.
Dawn Serra: Yes. It’s fascinating to me that there’s these very sexual images of genitals and erotic art that’s just really been happening for centuries and centuries and centuries. I think, oftentimes, we think of so much of our sexuality, specifically BDSM, as being fairly new. In fact, I mean, there’s pictures that I’ve seen on your feed of people being bent over and spanked from many hundreds of years ago.
Kate Lister: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing about any kind of history of kink or the history of sex work or anything like that is it tends to be shrouded in secrecy. So finding its history can be tricky. But it’s certainly there. BDSM has a very long history. There’s been Roman frescoes of spanking scenes found that are thousands of years old. The Victorians were hugely into flagellation. It was known as the English (inaudible?) at one point. One of our many gifts to the world.
Dawn Serra: That and tea, perfect.
Kate Lister: That and tea. Isn’t that what you need? Absolutely. Cup of tea and spank, and we’re all done.
Dawn Serra: That’s right.
Kate Lister: But, yeah. Spanking was big in the 19th century. It’s seen so much of the written pornography, under the photograph pornography. I find that quite comforting, actually. Just to see it. We’ve always had a kinky side to us. This isn’t new. It’s not something that we’ve just come up with. It’s always been there. But what’s happening is that it’s more open, We’re more able to discuss it. It’s in a more public forum than perhaps it’s ever been allowed to be before, which might be why we think it’s new, but it’s not.
Dawn Serra: I also just like how that helps to shift the dialogue around this idea that BDSM is some type of mental illness or perversion, which, thankfully, we’re moving away from now in mental health circles. But to know that this has been a part of the erotic experience for centuries and aeons, I think really helps to just reinforce the fact that this is a normal part of the way so many of us experience our bodies and pleasure and sex.
Kate Lister: Yeah. There’s just this idea that we have normal sex. Then we have these bizarre deviations and perversions from it. I think that’s something that really needs dismantling because human sexuality is infinitely varied. It’s infinitely enjoyable, and it always has been.
That’s the other thing too, is if you read through the history of it, and you realize that this is just part of who we are. This is just part of the human experience is enjoying sex and experimenting with sex and having psychosexual development. I think it’s something that’s uniquely human as well. I mean, I’d need to speak to a zoologist or someone. But I don’t think there are wildebeest on the Serengeti asking you to spank zebras.
Dawn Serra: That would be quite the development.
Kate Lister: It would be. That would be a headline, a just in. But it’s a really human thing, isn’t it? Is this kind of real kink and playing with it and enjoying it. Yeah, it has a really long, really strong history. And a valuable one because it teaches us that this isn’t perverted or wrong. It’s just part of who we are.
Dawn Serra: Well, the same really goes, I think, with sex work and what your Twitter is demonstrating of just through all of the different waves of power and religion and expressions of humanity, there’s always been the sex worker or I know words that were used in the past are things like prostitutes and whores. But there’s always been this part of society that’s at play, and sometimes being talked about a little more openly than others. Then, of course, all of the language that goes with sex work, and some of the phrases that you share on the Instagram are just fantastic.
Kate Lister: They’re quite revealing, aren’t they? I mean, you can tell a lot about how our culture views certain people or certain behaviors by the language that’s used to surround it. For example, we talk about sex workers as being the oldest profession, but it isn’t actually. It’s not at all. There’s a number of indigenous societies, groups of people around the world that have no word for sex worker, whore, or prostitute. It’s just not in their vocabulary.
For sex work to exist as a profession, you need to have commerce. You need to have money. You need to have the idea that you have a job for a living. And that’s something that happened with civilization. If you go back to indigenous tribes, I think the aborigines in Australia, they didn’t have. There’s no recorded instance of sex work amongst them. The Native Hawaiians in the 19th century, when Christian missionaries came over from America to civilize the Hawaiians, they had to invent words to explain to them what adultery was or what sex work was because it just didn’t exist in their vocabulary. So they have to invent words to teach them, “This is wrong.” Which I find fascinating because it just wasn’t part– The idea of sexual shame of that being wrong – “That’s a bad thing” – they didn’t (inaudible?). That just wasn’t part of their experience. I think that’s really important.
Dawn Serra: That is fascinating.
Kate Lister: Isn’t it? Because that just shows you how fluid our attitudes to sex are because it’s so entrenched in us – that good sex, bad sex, “This is good,” “That’s bad,” “This is wrong.” We’re moving away from this constant moralizing of sex. But just goes to show that there are societies, and still are, in certain hill tribes in Thailand – I can’t remember the name of them – but they have no concept of sex work either. No words for it. There are islands around the world who have no word for whore or any of that because they don’t see sex as being shameful. So why would you have a word to try and stigmatize someone because they’re having sex? That kind of thing.
I think that this idea of sexual shame and stigmatizing people seems to be something that the West have been particularly good at.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Kate Lister: So called civilization. Yeah. I find that fascinating. Because if we look at that, we can understand that our attitudes to sex aren’t set in stone, that they’re part of an ongoing process. And they can be changed. We can move to a place where maybe one day we won’t even understand shame around sex work. Maybe.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that’s so powerful in all of us understanding that the ideas that we often have about sex are not our own.
Kate Lister: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Dawn Serra: They’ve been assigned to us. We’ve internalized them as our own, but not actually our own. It’s just what everyone’s told us we’re supposed to believe or feel about that.
Kate Lister: Yeah. They’re inherited cultural units, almost, is that we get told that “This is bad,” “This is wrong.” We just get taught how to behave sexually. Then we inherit it, and then we propagate it, and we keep going with it. But these attitudes aren’t set. They can be changed. They can be challenged. They can evolve. They can move back again. So that’s hopeful because that means that we’re moving, hopefully, to a more inclusive and more understanding place.
Dawn Serra: With all of the hundreds and hundreds of images that you’ve shared, and all of the discussions that you’ve had with your very engaged audience, what are some of your either favorite things you’ve shared or favorite things you’ve learned since creating Whores of Yore?
Kate Lister: Well, like I said, the followers, they teach me things all the time. They teach me things all the time. They call me on things very quickly, if they think that I’ve overstepped the mark. The other thing that I’ve learned from Twitter pretty early on is that you’re always going to offend somebody. I try very, very hard to not upset people. But then again, at the same time, you do have to hold on to what’s important to you. Because otherwise, you’re just going to end up with something that’s so diluted by trying to please everybody. That is not going to happen. There’s just always going to be some people out there that don’t like seeing pictures of dicks. You can’t do anything with that. So you’ve got to stay true to what’s important to you.
But the sex work community have been absolutely vital to the feed and to how I do research, actually. They’ve changed what I think about how I want to engage with that particular subject. It’s made me even more passionate about the feed being a platform for their experience. And that’s been something–
Kate Lister: Another issue that is raised for me is, as an academic, as someone that researches sex work is what sex worker rights doesn’t need really another male academic speaking for them. So it’s made me very conscious of that – to not ever exclude what’s known as the authentic voice, their voice. Because they are a group of people that are misunderstood, that’s misrepresented. Unfortunately, they have very well-meaning people speaking for them, but perhaps not allowing them to speak for themselves. So that’s something I want to challenge a lot. They’re really important. Getting their voice, and getting their feedback. And allowing them to speak to me, and what’s important to them, and what do they want, and all of those things that are vital to me.
One of the things I love doing is at the end of the day, just before I go to bed, I always find a silly picture, I post it and I say, “Captions. Captions, please.” It’s probably my favorite time the whole evening because they’re so silly. The stuff that comes back, honestly, has been brilliant. It’s brilliant. I love retweeting that. They’re just very funny.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I’ve noticed that a lot of your retweets are not only the captions that people weigh in on, which can be amazing.
Kate Lister: They’re so good, aren’t they?
Dawn Serra: Yes! It’s really pointed out to me that I may be good at a lot of things in life, but coming up with puns is definitely not one of them. Because I’m so in awe of some of the things people come up with. That is just not– My brain is not wired that way.
Kate Lister: I agree. I’m exactly the same. They’re just (inaudible?) absolutely amazing ones. Yeah, fantastic.
Dawn Serra: Although some of yours are hysterical. I mean, one of them was a medieval piece of art with a man unclicking his penis and your caption was “Medieval filth.” Something about that just completely tickled me. And I love the discussions. I mean, the Daily Dot did an article on you. They featured a little exchange that you had with a sex worker in that you had tweeted out how sex workers in ancient Rome were to wear flame-colored togas. In 13th century Marseilles, they did a striped cloak, and in England, a striped hood.
Kate Lister: That’s right. Yes.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. A sex worker had replied that in 21st century London, we wear Louboutin, Chanel bags, and smiles.
Kate Lister: See. How could you not love that? That’s so good.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Well, I think it’s such a lovely way for this dialogue to be happening where that’s not a threatening tweet. Someone reading that might be a little shocked and might be a little surprised. But here’s a sex worker actually doing something that’s a little tongue in cheek about, “Hey, we’re all around you. This is what we look like.” Now, we have this voice that’s amplified, but in a way that’s not like booga booga scary sex worker.
Kate Lister: Yeah. I think that that’s… Yeah. I really see the value of the feed in that. Like I said, I’m very conscious of the fact that I don’t want to speak for sex workers again because that would be a crap thing to do. But by allowing sex workers to – I say allowing – but hopefully, sex workers engage with the feed, and I can retweet them. I can point followers in the direction of what concerns them. I get messages all day, every day about people saying that I’ve changed their view on sex work. That they didn’t realize that it was the experience that it was. I actually changed my mum’s view on sex work, not just her, but the whole of her Women’s Institute group, who sit around each week and do crafts. It was brilliant.
A sex worker, who’s now stand up comic called Miranda Kane, she does a show, a stand up show based on her experience as a sex worker. It’s called “Coin Operated Girl.” She gave me some tickets to come and see her. I took my mum and all of her WI friends who are just these lovely, but very beige, slightly elderly ladies who brought knitting thing. Then Miranda did this whole 20 minutes on face sitting and squirting. “Are you having a nice time?”
Dawn Serra: It’s good for them.
Kate Lister: “Does anybody want anything from the bar?” Oh, god. But honestly, we left and in the whole way home, everybody in that car was going, “She was so good. I had no idea, Kate. I didn’t know. I did not know.” They all talked about how it revolutionized the way that we think about sex work. And you know why? Because she punctured that narrative of sex workers are abused, drug addict, trafficked, pimped out, all of those things. Like everyone’s shivering on street corners and beaten up every day. When you start to dismantle that narrative, that’s an extremely powerful thing. I hope that that’s what the feed does. By retweeting things that that sex worker said about Louboutins, that’s humanizing. It’s funny, but it’s got a really serious point behind it. Which is that, “We’re here.”
Dawn Serra: One of the other things that you’re doing with Whores of Yore is because you are also sharing images of naked bodies from throughout eras and across the world, you’ve also gotten a lot of people who are saying that you’re helping around body shame and body positivity. Isn’t that right?
Kate Lister: Yes. Yeah. That wasn’t something that I saw coming at all. I’m thrilled I’m really touched that it would have that reaction. But I think what it is is that when you– Firstly, you don’t see old pornography that much. You just don’t see very often pictures of Victorians buggering each other with bottles, but they’re there.
The thing that I find really powerful about these images is not only does it say, “Look. They were having sex, and they were having fun.” But the body shapes in them is– This is before silicon and before Brazilians and before airbrushing and Photoshop and size zero and all those things. What you’ve got are just regular-sized people with little pot-bellies and a full fuzzy bushy and hairy armpits and no makeup on, and they look beautiful. Not in like everyone’s beautiful color. They really do look beautiful and glamorous.
Kate Lister: I had two messages this week: one from a girl telling me that it was… She said that she has a daughter, and when her daughter gets to be old enough, she’s going to show her the pictures of Whores of Yore because she wants her to see what women’s bodies look like. I thought that was such a lovely thing. She said that she knows that that sounds like a bizarre thing to say – you’d show your child pictures of porn, essentially – but she was making the point that her child’s already seeing hypersexualized images of really distorted bodies. It was just that she was focusing on the little pot-bellies and the cellulite and all those things. That wasn’t a reaction that I’ve seen. But now when I thought about it, you don’t see bodies that look like that in modern porn or modern magazines. Do you?
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Kate Lister: When you got a little belly and some fuzz and boobs that maybe aren’t like two soccer balls stuck to your chest, that can be–
Dawn Serra: Yeah, just seeing that diversity is amazing.
Kate Lister: I know. But what’s more frightening about it, that’s just what a normal body looks like. But now, we’ve become so disconnected from it. So disconnected. I’ve had classrooms full of students before, and we’re talking about feminism and gender, and the history of pubic hair fascinates me endlessly.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yes. Oh, I love talking about pubic hair.
Kate Lister: I mean, the idea should just be like whatever the hell you want to do with it, you do with it. I mean, you dye it pink and stick macaroni pasta and sparkles on it. Whatever you want.
Dawn Serra: If anyone does that, please send a picture.
Kate Lister: Get a Mr. Potato Head. Whatever it is that you want to do with your pubic hair, do it. But I have been with rooms full of 18 year old girls before, students, undergraduates, and they have said things like, “Pubic hair is disgusting. It’s disgusting.” If you think about it, your body, your hair that grows naturally on your body is disgusting? How do we get to that point? It’s actually regarded as something grotesque and something that makes them visibly shudder. I just think that’s really interesting, that how do we get to that?
Dawn Serra: Right. What’s the next step? I mean, if through the ages, we’ve had different dialogues about the way our bodies are supposed to look, different amounts of underarm hair and pubic hair, and the length of our hair, and the ways that our bodies look, imagine 100 years from now or 200 years from now, what would they be saying about the way we’re groomed now? And allowing space for us to realize this is not the right way to do it. It’s just the current way to do it. And it’s going to change.
Kate Lister: Yeah. I like that. It’s just hard because you know it will change. It will change again. Pubic hairstyles have come and gone throughout history. The ancient Egyptians, both sexes, just took everything off. There was no pubic hair at all, not on men either. You get pictures from very early Victorian ones where there’s clearly hair removal going on. Then you get right up to the 1970s when it’s just for bush. But now, this is just the current fashion that we’ve got. I think – I could be wrong – but I think pube is going to make a bit of a comeback. I think Lady Gaga did something with pubic hair. Did she? Or maybe I’ve just dreamed that. But, yeah. I think–
Dawn Serra: I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Kate Lister: No, no. I think they’re beginning to make a bit of a comeback, but I’m not sure. But yet, fashions change, right?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, exactly. I think that when you watch feminist ethical porn, you see a lot more pubic hair and a lot more different ways of styling or showing pubic hair. I think that as those images become more popular, it starts shifting the dialogue a little bit. So I think you’re right. I think more people are starting to leave space. I spent probably, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years feeling like, if I did have pubic hair, that people would find me gross.
Kate Lister: Yeah.
Dawn Serra: That was from 18 through my late 20s, probably. Unlike now, I mean, I haven’t shaved my pubic hair in probably six months, and it’s amazing. It’s a wonderful thing to touch and play with. So allowing for that change and that shift in how I’m experiencing my body is a great thing. Hopefully, everyone leaves space for that for themselves, too.
Kate Lister: Yeah. I think that the idea with all of these things, it should be that it’s just do whatever it is that you want to do. But don’t ever feel that you have to do something. I mean, it’s the strangest thing because I don’t remember anybody coming into the classroom when we were 15, 16 and saying, “Girls, everybody must take the pubic hair off immediately.” So where did this message come from? I’m always curious as to why should we start doing it? Was it a boy that said that they didn’t like it? I think that most of my partners would have just been quietly grateful no matter how I presented it to them.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, “Well, we’re getting naked, so accept whatever hair is down there or not.”
Kate Lister: I can’t imagine any guy would get to that crucial point, and then would go, “Well, I’m out.”
Dawn Serra: “I’m tapping out.”
Kate Lister: “I can’t work with this. I can’t work in this situation.”
Dawn Serra: I would love to know from you, one of my favorite things that you post is the Whores of Yore word of the day. Some of them are spectacular and hysterical. I’m looking at one right now that’s called “warming the husband’s supper.”
Kate Lister: Oh, I loved that one.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, me too. It’s from the 19th century.
Kate Lister: Yep. Yeah. It was when a woman would lift up her skirts, and she wouldn’t be wearing any knickers because knickers were a 20th century invention. So she’d be pantless. She would lift up her skirt, she would warm her bottom and genitals at the fire. It’s the idea that you’re warming your husband’s supper. You’re warming up your genitals on the fire.
Dawn Serra: Which is amazing.
Kate Lister: Another one of my favorites was, I think it’s the 18th century. It was “sneezing in the cabbage.” That was oral sex on a woman – cunnilingus. I just adore that one. “Sneezing in the cabbage.”
Dawn Serra: Oh, I’m going to have to start using that.
Kate Lister: I hope daily that people do. I hope that someone somewhere, just one person has said to a lover, “Do you want to sneeze in my cabbage?”
Dawn Serra: Yeah. One of the other ones that you have is “poodle sack.”
Kate Lister: Yeah. That’s a vagina, isn’t it? That’s 18th century as well.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, the statement you have for it is amazing – “I must make an appointment with the waxer, Patricia. My poodle sack has become feral.”
Kate Lister: They’re just amazing though. I love looking at slang because it just shows that we’ve always thought it was funny as well. It doesn’t have to be so serious all the time. We have thought that these things are funny. I really like my word of the day from yesterday, actually. I don’t know. Did you have the expression in America that we say something is cobblers. We say “our cobblers…” It’s like the equivalent of saying, “Oh, dumb.” No. “Oh, balls,” or bullshit, basically,
Dawn Serra: We definitely have balls or bullshit. That kind of stuff. Yeah.
Kate Lister: Well, cobblers, it turns out is a 19th century cockney rhyming slang. It means bollocks. It means testicles. It comes from cobblers awls balls. But in the UK, cobblers is quite a polite expression like, “Oh, phooey.” But it turns out that every time you say it, you actually say, “Oh, testicles.” I love that.
Dawn Serra: How wonderful to be able to find these words and how they were used, and then point them towards more modern uses of language, and being able to say, “Well, that’s actually where that came from.”
Kate Lister: Yes. Well, most someone told me that avocado actually means testicle, which I really liked as well. I thought that was brilliant.
Dawn Serra: Oh, that is wonderful.
Kate Lister: Yeah. I love that tracing back word origins. I think that’s absolutely fascinating. Like pornography. That literally means the writing of prostitutes or written by harlots. That’s what that means.
Dawn Serra: Oh, I did not know that.
Kate Lister: Yeah. As in written and prostitute or sex worker, harlot. Written by harlots.
Dawn Serra: Wow. See. We’re all learning something powerful because we all consume pornography. But now we know where that word comes from.
Kate Lister: Now you know. Now you know. Absolutely. I think the word of the day definitely is one of my favorites because they’re just so silly, and quite powerful as well, so powerful.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Kate Lister: It’s funny.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Because a lot of what’s coming through in the words that you share is because you can see that the time period that they come from – like the 18th or the 19th centuries, and even a few of them from the 15th and the 16th centuries – it seems to really speak to how people are feeling about sex work and genitals at that time.
Kate Lister: Yes. Yeah. It really does, doesn’t it? (inaudible?) really gross words (inaudible?). But now there’s duck butter from the early 20th century that meant semen. Duck butter. Wooh.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. That brings a very, very specific visual to mind.
Kate Lister: Doesn’t it? That’s just lovely. Oh. Another from the 18th century was window pie, which means a woman that’s had sex outside of marriage. The reason that she’s called a window pie is because if you left a pie on the window, someone would steal a piece. Likening her to a pie that’s had a bit stolen before it was eaten by the proper owner.
Dawn Serra: Wow. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I noticed something that you had tweeted early in October was from Theodore of Canterbury which I think was around 690…
Kate Lister: AD.
Dawn Serra: He had written what he thought about where semen should or should not go. It says, “Whoever ejaculates seed into the mouth, that is the worst evil. From someone it was judged that they repent this up to the end of their lives.” So don’t come in someone’s mouth because apparently, that’s the worst thing you could possibly do as a human.
Kate Lister: I agree with Theodore. If you don’t give someone warning, and then you come in their mouth, that’s really bad manners. But I just think that that’s what he meant. He’s an Irish priest. That verse is written by a series that was written called Penitential. They were basically priests’ handbooks for sins that flock, their parishioners would confess to them and how much penance they would have to give that person. So it’s almost like a sin index. If somebody would go to Theodore and confess, “Someone’s come in my mouth,” then he could look up his little sin book and go, “Ah, right. Yes. Sorry… done for the rest of your life.”
Dawn Serra: “That one’s particularly bad. But for murder, you just have to do this 20 times.”
Kate Lister: You would be surprised what gets ranked of murder in some of these. Some of them, you’re reading through it and thinking, “Did someone actually…” That must have happened for that person to come up with a penitent for it. There was a guy called – What was he called? – Bishop Birchwald, I think. I think he’s German. He writes this, he says, “Have you done what some women have done and made phallus from bread?” Then he talks about basically making bread strap-ons and having sex with other women with them.
Dawn Serra: Wow.
Kate Lister: Yeah. That’s medieval stuff. So that must have happened often enough for Bishop Birchwald to come up with that. Who’s been making strap-ons from bread again?
Dawn Serra: I have to say I fucked myself with a lot of bizarre objects, but bread has never occurred to me. So I’m impressed by that.
Kate Lister: I love that. I don’t think that we’re talking about a loaf of mighty white.
Dawn Serra: Yes. A nice solid, crusty bread from the heart.
Kate Lister: Yeah. Something quite sturdy, I think. But that just reminded me that there was this medieval tradition, something called cuckold bread. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one. Cuckold bread was– You get a list of superstitious beliefs and we still do them a little bit. Like if you look into a mirror at midnight and say something five times, and you’ll see the person that you’re going to marry and all that kind of stuff. But cuckold bread was a young girl – or a woman, I suppose – if she fancied somebody and she wanted him to love her back, she would need bread with her vagina between her legs, and then she would bake it. Then she would give it to him, and then he would eat it and be consumed with lust. That’s cuckold bread. There’s a little song and a dance that’s recorded as going with it as well, where these girls would get up on the table and lift their skirts way above their head, dance around, and then sitting on piles of dough. I’m reading it going, “Wow. Wow.”
Dawn Serra: That is impressive.
Kate Lister: Yeah. So that’s a tip for you. That if anybody gives you a piece of homemade bread that looks suspiciously like a vulva with some hair–
Dawn Serra: You know what is about to happen.
Kate Lister: Absolutely. You just watch yourself. Vagina bread for you.
Dawn Serra: There’s just so much about this. I mean, I just want everyone to go check out everything that you post. I mean, right now, I’m looking at a picture that’s attributed to Peter Fendi from 1835–
Kate Lister: Ooh! It’s a woman pissing in men’s cups and they’re drinking it.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Yeah. It’s all of these well-dressed gentlemen with their hard cocks out on the table. There’s six of them. She’s standing there with her dress up on top of the table peeing into their mugs, and they’re all cheering each other. It looks like this big huge feast that they’re all enjoying. It’s just fascinating to me. I mean, here is an artist who thought that this… I mean, who knows? Maybe he experienced this act. But here’s someone who’s using their urine in a very sexual way, and these men are loving it. They’re all hard and turned on. I mean, it’s just we definitely did not invent anything.
Kate Lister: No. I struggle to find something that I… Maybe apart from sexting, but that’s only because they didn’t have the technology. Whatever technology that we come up with, I don’t think us finding a way to use it sexually is far behind that. I think the first porn film was released less than a year after the first actual film. So I just don’t think that we’ve invented anything new. No. People have always been turned on by pee. There’s loads of great Victorian pictures of women pissing all over everything.
Dawn Serra: Do you think there’s a chance that it’s squirting, and they just didn’t know what it was so they depicted it as urine?
Kate Lister: No. Because I think that they know what squirting is. They know what squirting was. They know what ejaculate is. At least it’s recorded in the Victorian erotic literature. I mean, you get a lot of misconceptions around things. But no, they’re pretty damn clear when something is being pissed.
Dawn Serra: Nice.
Kate Lister: They know. Whether or not female ejaculate was widely known, but it is referenced in Victorian photography, so they at least knew what it was. But no, they certainly knew what peeing was, and were quite keen on it, it would seem.
Dawn Serra: Oh, my gosh. I’m so glad you started this Twitter because the more I learn and the more I see, the more I want to know. I love that you’re doing all of this research. I think so much of it, as entertaining as it is, it’s also very educational and teaching us about the attitudes that we have around sex and where they perhaps come from.
Kate Lister: I hope it is. What I want is that the content is humorous, and it’s accessible, and it’s interesting. But if you do actually learn something, it’s serving a purpose. Because it’s important that we know our debates and where these things come from. Should I tweet you a picture of some Victorian women peeing?
Dawn Serra: Oh, my gosh.
Kate Lister: Do you want to see?
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Kate Lister: OK. This is just for you.
Dawn Serra: I feel so special.
Kate Lister: I hope I tweeted it to you. Otherwise, someone’s going to get a real shock.
Dawn Serra: Oh, I got it. Oh, my god. That’s spectacular. OK. Everyone who listens needs to go and check out this at @Dawn_Serra, that Kate just tweeted. It’s three women who are peeing, and it looks like they’re suspending something with their pee.
Kate Lister: It does, doesn’t it? I don’t know. They did have editing techniques. They did have manipulating techniques, but I think that they’re peeing in sync there.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, that’s wonderful. And I love the little smiles.
Kate Lister: Don’t they look so happy?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, they have bonnets on. They’re grinning like. “Hahaha! We’re peeing.” Their legs are spread, and then they have tons and tons of layers of clothing on.
Kate Lister: They’re like proper Victorian ladies, but they’re just pissing on each other at the same time.
Dawn Serra: Oh, I love it. Oh, that’s amazing.
Kate Lister: I don’t know. I think that it’s really important. I mean, it’s an amazing image, but it’s also loaded with so much history. Every time you see something like that, it punches this idea that sex is new or that our ancestors weren’t having sex or that it wasn’t enjoyable or any of those things.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that just, culturally, we’re all raised to believe that our generation is the most forward thinking and the most risque and the most outside the box and that our parents would have no understanding of what it is we’re actually doing, our grandparents. Considering the pictures that you tweet from folks that are in the 20s, the 30s, the 50s, the 70s, it’s evident that literally, throughout the course of recorded history, people have been doing some really kinky shit. We’re not the most sexually – I don’t know – advanced generation, just because we happen to be doing all of these sexual things that we didn’t hear about or see. It’s been around. I mean, there’s this beautiful picture of these three amazing women pissing. I mean, that’s great.
Kate Lister: It is. It is great though that king has always been there. But I think that it’s important to know that the sexual revolution in the 1960s is not ground zero for sexual revolution. But what I think is important about our generation and where we’re going is that it’s much more public now. That I can even have a Twitter account and tweet that to the public is quite amazing because that certainly wouldn’t have been a widely circulated image. That would have been very hush hush. You would have either commissioned that or you’d been very rich to have got it or you would have bought it in a specialist shop somewhere. But the fact that we can talk about it, that we can have those dialogues, I think that’s what makes us quite important, I think.
But we’re not the most sexually liberated time period. The Romans, the Greeks had very different sexual attitudes to our own. I mean, that you can go to Pompeii and see these enormous erotic frescoes that were just on the walls of people’s houses. Just the places where they would be eating with their families, there’s just huge sculptures of cocks. That’s just a completely different attitude to the one that we’ve got.
Kate Lister: You mentioned about the women with the penis tree and those things. Those images of the margins of medieval manuscripts are normally religious ones. They were done by monks. And no one knows why.
Dawn Serra: Wow.
Kate Lister: We’re always guessing, “What was the mindset of these particular people, so they would all be sat around having their Sunday lunch with grandma and grandpa, and the rest of it, there’s just a giant dick on the wall?” What did they think about that? My best guess is that it just would not have shocked them. It was just part of their life. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that that was an offensive image because we’ve made it offensive.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I know that some of your current research now that you’re working on is around sexual violence and contemporary culture. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that because I think you’re so right in that the way that our contemporary culture views and talks about sex and bodies and violence is a really important story to tell. So I’d love to hear about some of the research you’re doing.
Kate Lister: But the research that I’m doing at the moment is, I’m really interested in the way that history is used as a setting for contemporary film cinema. It will take something like Game of Thrones, for example – which I love, by the way – but that has extremely high levels of sexual violence, of graphic sex scenes and violence, in general. I’ve been doing a lot of research with a younger audience members, and it seems that the number one reason and justification for that, for those levels of sexual violence, is it’s medieval. That it’s historically accurate. Then I was really interested in that.
Then I started to see more and more medieval-type shows, medieval films or just historical dramas, and these levels of sexual violence in them are always very high. So it’s just very interesting to me that we have recast our own history as a time of sexual barbarism. We now are exploring perhaps our own fetish for sexual violence by dressing up in chainmail and giving it a sword, and excusing it by going, “Oh, the Vikings were just like that.”
Kate Lister: We don’t have any– Take for example the Vikings. The phrase that always goes with them is rape and pillage, rape and pillage, rape and pillage. We have gotten no evidence that that happened. We’ve got nothing. We’ve got diddly-squat. What we’ve got is the record of a few nuns in Britain, who were so scared the Vikings were going to come over and rape them, they slit their noses to make themselves less sexually attractive.
Dawn Serra: Wow.
Kate Lister: Yeah. It’s quite a stance right. But we don’t have any contemporary accounts from the Vikings. There’s no Viking diary that’s been found that says, “Got up at seven. Raped, pillaged, then had tea.” There’s nothing. So all that whole image – “rape and pillage,” “rape and pillage” – is a completely modern construction that we have attached to the Vikings. We don’t know that that’s what they were like. It’s a myth that we’ve created around them. I’m really interested in why that’s happened, why we’ve done that, what this image of this barbaric, hypermasculine raping and pillaging Viking, and conversely, the threatened and endangered wench. What’s the purpose to those roles? What does it say about us that we need that? I think that’s really interesting.
Dawn Serra: I love that question of what does that say about us that we need or crave those images? The first thing that comes into mind is finding ways to reinforce our ideas of masculinity, specifically within toxic masculinity. That’s really interesting, I hope you’re going to publish a paper about what you find.
Kate Lister: Well, I’m in the process, at the moment, of analyzing data that I’ve been taking from it, and trying to work out what audiences see when they see that. The idea that, like you said, it’s reinforcing this idea of what’s called – psychologists, sociologists – hypermasculinity, otherwise known as toxic masculinity. That comes through quite strongly. That this is some of what real men do. That they take what they want. That they’re violent. That this kind of sexual domination is just part of what makes the manly men. And that’s really interesting.
I’ve talked to the students about it a lot because we do a couple of modules on Game of Thrones and on medievalism. They always have some very interesting ideas. One of the things that they thought might be happening is that we live in a very politically correct society where there’s nowhere to explore that, and perhaps by setting something in the medieval period or in the past, it gives you a license to be aggressive and to explore that.
Dawn Serra: Ah, that’s interesting. It’s almost like taking the rape fantasies that so many of us have inside ourselves and that maybe we see play out in pornography. But then twisting it just enough that it’s consumable from mainstream.
Kate Lister: That’s it. Yeah. Because then we’re removed from it. We’re like one step removed from it. We don’t have to question the legitimacy of it. We don’t have to question why is there so much rape in this because we’ve already told ourselves that there was just loads of rape in the Middle Ages. This is what happened. It gives it some kind of legitimacy. But really, what it’s doing is it’s feeding our own fantasies, our own desires.
Dawn Serra: What have you found to actually be the truth around… I’ve seen images of child brides being married off to kings and things like that. But what have you found is actually in the evidence of the art and the writing of medieval times around– Would it have even been called rape?
Kate Lister: Well, it’s a difficult subject to research because the primary evidence that’s left was there isn’t a lot of it, and what there is tends to be in church records, ecclesiastical courts, those kind of things. Rape, even now, is terribly underreported crime, certainly underpunished, and all those things. That cast that back into the past when the judicial system is even, even worse. So the few cases that we’ve got will be but a handful of what was actually going on. But they did, of course, knew that rape was wrong. You get that all the way through. There isn’t a society I’m aware of that’s never said, “No, rape’s fine. It’s fine.” It’s always been bad.
But what constitutes rape has shifted quite dramatically. For example, your average 14th century person wouldn’t have had any understanding of rape within marriage, really. It wouldn’t have been the idea because that was only made illegal, even in Britain, I think it’s 1990 marital rape. So there wouldn’t have been any understanding of that. If rape carried certain penalties, normally, you have to pay money to the father of the woman who was raped because it was regarded as a property crime. You damaged his property.
Dawn Serra: Wow.
Kate Lister: Yeah. Yes, not a nice history. But there are different prices recorded for different women. For example, a virgin of noble birth, you’d have to pay a heavier fine than if you raped a peasant or if you raped a wife or any of those things. So they certainly understood that rape was wrong. But what constituted rape to them was largely young virgins dragged off the streets in the middle of the night, which is not that different from what we have today. I don’t think they’re thinking about it.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yeah. I totally agree. We have not changed that much
Kate Lister: When we start looking at it, no, I don’t think we have. But then now we’ve got data. In the 18th century, rape trials were recorded, written down and sold in leather bound books as pornographic material. You can buy very expensive copies of the rape trial. So knowing that that would happen, the lawyers would deliberately extract as much gruesome detail from the victim as they possibly can.
Dawn Serra: Wow.
Kate Lister: It’s extremely cruel. Extremely cruel. But one thing that we probably can say is that the levels of sexual violence in the Middle Ages were not as high as they are depicted in Game of Thrones, where every named female character, give or take one or maybe two, is either subject to or threatened with sexual violence at some point. I mean, sexual violence in the Middle Ages wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like you couldn’t walk from one end of the street to the other without, “Oh, I have gotten raped again.” That kind of thing. Of course, they had moral compasses. You couldn’t just go around raping people. And rapists were punished by death at some points in history – castration, exile, imprisonment, branding, all those things. So it certainly wasn’t (inaudible?). It’s very, very difficult. But there’s a serious disconnect between historical fact and public opinion.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I have to say that when you said that my first thought was, “Wow. I’m definitely…” Up until this conversation, my assumption has been that the depictions I’ve seen in mainstream media and Hollywood were more historically accurate or at least based in some fact.
Kate Lister: We all do, we all do. But that’s the honest truth of it, especially with something like the Vikings, is that we just don’t know. We just don’t know what their attitude to sexual violence was. We can make educated guesses on the scamp material that we’ve got. But as for this idea that they were marauding hordes, attacking winches, there’s very little evidence for that either way. But that’s what really interests me is that disconnect between fact and what we like to believe – the stories that we’ve created and what that serves. Why do we like to think about the Vikings as these big, burly men raping and pillaging?
Dawn Serra: Well, I hope when you finish going through all of your research and you publish something, that you’ll share it with me because I would love to make sure that I share that with all the listeners. Because I am sure I’m not the only one who’s completely fascinated and wants to know more now.
Kate Lister: I’d love to. Happy to. Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that I find really, really interested is that we rewrite the past to be heavily eroticized by our own standards.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Well, we are at the end of our hour. I would love it… We’ve mentioned it many times, but just in case anybody needs it, can you share with people how they can stay in touch with you online, your social media links and/or any other links you want to share?
Kate Lister: Of course, yeah, you can get me, obviously, @WhoresofYore. My personal Twitter account is @k8_lister. I think if you just put in Kate Lister, it should come up. Then there’s my university profile page. If you go to leedstrinity.ac.uk, I’ll come up there as well, and we can have a chat. I like chatting.
Dawn Serra: Well, I will have all of those links on dawnserra.com for this episode. Yeah, so I invite everyone to check it out and to click through and to follow Whores of Yore all over Twitter and Instagram. It’s some of my favorite content when it comes up in my feed. I just want to thank you Kate for coming on the show and sharing all of this. I literally want to change my profession just so that I can do all this stuff with you because it sounds so fascinating.
Kate Lister: Come to England with me, and we’ll drink tea and tweet pictures of willies. Oh, it’ll be lots of fun.
Dawn Serra: Oh. That sounds like a dream day.
Kate Lister: No. I’ll come to you. We’ll go to tea. Yeah, let’s do that.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. We can go somewhere with sunshine, and we can just tweet pics of naked people.
Kate Lister: To Mexico. Brilliant.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Perfect. Cocktails on a beach. I want to thank all of our listeners who tuned in. I hope that you learned something because I know I certainly did and that you were entertained. Of course, if you do check out Whores of Yore on Twitter or Instagram, be sure to tweet or retweet your favorites, tweet them at me, share them with me via emails so that we can get lots of sharing going on and get more attention to this amazing, amazing project that Kate has started. Until next week. This is Dawn Serra. Bye.
Kate Lister: Bye!